The busy gospel of the sun

Night Races By

The night races by. It throws up
broad black sails and casts me
overboard like a shadow. Night
races by. The scuppered hours
slosh through the slits sabered
in the decksides by the last moon
and are gone. Night races by.
The terminator line rushes up like
a mad tide, swallows twilight
strollers in a wave of starry hunger.
Night races by. The silvered minutes
flint like fish bracing against the
bowbreak, scatter like sparks from
a wheel of lathed lightning. Night
races by. It tumbles colossal pressing
westward, a dawnfearing leviathan
spooked by fathoms of underlight it
cannot see, tirelessly pulls along what
it most lives in dread of. Night races
by. Emptied of eyes that sing the busy
gospel of the sun, it compensates with
retinal mirrors that absorb what
schools blindly beneath, lumbers
unrelenting toward formless shores
that cannot withstand the absence
of amassing dusk. Night races by.



I am left jettisoned in its wake with
only these words for ballast and succor.
I will know a reckless sleep. Night
races by as the day rushes forth, a
wage of bright plague to scour and
sweep what little dare foolish tarry.

Joseph Gallo
November 28, 2006

Measure by lasting measure

graciously took me to see



in solana beach, where i got one of his



that was just before my



some three weeks ago.



i still hear the music . . .

Black notes against a stave of sky

Earthquake Weather

I do not know the true nature of the tools I employ. Function
and purpose lie outside my uncollected knowledge, but serve
well my experience. This has always been so. I’ve been bitten
by three dogs. Language failed me each time. The instinct for
expression, however, flung me by the tail of my lizard’s brain.

I cannot deconstruct the black marks I make. I drift between
sum parts and total. Poetry arrived within me via panspermia
from nether regions whose emptinesses hold every secret thing
that bullets forth from the unconscious tumble of milk and dumb
iron. Such is the evolution of praise for a mountain wildflower.

As the mechanism of a mouth remains unspoken in its symmetry, so the issue of black ink affirms itself as proof. This is a language poem. I had never heard the term prior to the day before yesterday, which, like this school of idiomaxia, never existed. Take my words for it: Wednesday happened. It was hot and

humid, crows peppered the tops of tapered Italian cypress forming black notes against an unsung stave of sky. I breathed and ate, rested and wrote, blinked out the window through earthquake weather while a pulse throbbed griding across the stone of my skull. My calendar does not concur. It displays only one day,

this day, and all other squares remain blank. If the first lie of the Devil was tomorrow, then God’s first was yesterday. Few claim what lies between so I will make it my lie. I give it now to you. Do what you wish with it. Starve it, sell it, worship it. I do not care. It is yours. This poem is failing badly. I do not know enough to

emulate or ensummon. But it is not yet done with me. We go on. It is morning in California and the sun sacrifices itself. It pushes hydrogen and madness through the same pores and in this manner photosynthesis builds its temple. This will go on all day. I am not required to have faith or one misbelief in this. Messiahs may

germinate among its tenets and tendrils, beings hampered by the atomic weight of halos, carrying rich nutrient beneath the antway of a world desurrected. Technology has learned this simple trick of divinity, carries voices from behind clouds through wires we live in dread of touching. Continents thrum darker for this very

reason. Nothing is miraculous. Everything is common in the testament of its expression. Translated from impossible blood, I am a toxic bible—a good word struck daily from obelisks; a miswoven reed of irrelevance. This is how that most visible part of me came to be savior—a lost and loving underlord.

Joseph Gallo
June 30, 2006

Where cure and quiet commune

In The Time Of Apples
For JoAnn

Let us walk hatless in a light rain, the legs
of October running like the fine sweat of a clear
wine down the bowed spheres of our faces.

Let us see no metaphor in bronzing leaves snaking
vineward along the subtle withers of a coarse trunk,
no secret thing known only to our least unknowing.



What things shall we say to one another that elevation and
the whispers of snow might cause us to forget? Along the
road, weathered wood and rust-black iron mark the graves

of orchard machinery no longer useful, the fruit of their
industry idle as the hands that left them forsaken so.
Pies bulge with the laughter of children, their noses

pressed against craft-milled cabinet glass. Breakfast
begs biscuits and apple butter; cherry preserves prove
when crushed some things emerge richer, sweeter.

Closed doors and ivied windows press white against
green, musty larders where cure and quiet commune.
There are baskets to mend, burlap to patch, pickers



and sap-stained hands sure to miss the pluck or fall of
the very last Spartan, which is left to the ground as
tokenseed for the next season as the baker leaves a

small knot of dough to bind his next kneading loaves.
Coffee and an untended fire, mist moving like oaken
skirts across tin-topped quonsets that ghost in and out

of the treeline. These are the matters that mill moment
and time, mark motion to remain beyond ruin. In the time
of apples, this is enough. It is enough as it is never so.

Joseph Gallo
October 15, 2006

Monsters too terrible to imagine

Lies We Tell At Sea
For Cindy

We tell our landloved daughters the sea is a fancy room
in Florida, or a seminar on rigid software in San Diego,
anything but the awful tideless truth. But this is a grand deck
on a grand ship and there is a swollen wobble in the world.

Tonight I dream sixty knots on glass with Mexico racing by. There
are superstructures scattered in these waters erected to drain the
seabottom, siren tongues to dart and flash, to ensure the safety
of a way of life we fool ourselves into thinking we cannot afford.

These are the deep lies of leviathans pulling the long black
night through the eyehole of a moonless sea that cannot exist
anywhere but where it does. Dawn sleeps somewhere in soft
cotton skies as we glide over monsters too terrible to imagine,



but we do, we do anyway. At the piano bar, a string trio
gives us pause, frets us to consider the music of sinking
much sweeter than this somehow. They say drownwater is
an icy choir that cavitates a rapturous threnody in the soul.

Gunwales become a polished remorse, buoyancy a luckless joy.
Our daughters already know this for they too have learned to
tell us they mean something else, equally fathomless. After
all, the truth is too tenuous to trust. By virtue of some ancient

salt-faring past, we agree to tell these lies only at sea believing
this place worthy of holding all our schooling conceits, all the
unmeasured keepers and lamentable throwbacks we can muster
to heave overboard if only to see what floats and doesn’t.

Joseph Gallo
August 18, 2002